JAMES GROSE INTERVIEW

Grose point: Regardless of size, ‘a building is still a house’

WORDS HAMISH MCDONALD

Noted for his pared-down approach using industrialised structures and fabrics, James Grose grew up in Bundaberg and pursued industrial design at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and worked as a graphic artist before completing his architecture degree at Sydney University in 1984. His Grose Bradley partnership with wife Nicola Bradley soon won acclaim for house projects, but after merging with Bligh Voller Nield in 1998, Grose worked on bigger projects including the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, the CSIRO Synergy Building, the Campus MLC in North Sydney, the Kinghorn Cancer Centre in East Sydney, NAB’s office in Melbourne’s Docklands, and the prize-winning ASB North Wharf in Auckland. Now 67, Grose explains to Hamish Mcdonald that however big, a building is still a house.

HAMISH MCDONALD: Even when you were working with BVN on very big projects, you still tried to do two or three houses a year. Have you been able to keep that up?

JAMES GROSE: Not that many perhaps, but I’ve certainly kept doing houses. With Grose Bradley, most of my houses were outside of Sydney, often with quite modest budgets, but for interesting people keen on an interesting building. One was the Newman house in Wollongong that really set my career up. I was quite close to Glenn Murcutt and it was a referral from Glenn – he attracts the kind of client who want buildings appropriate for their place and their climate. What I was able to explore in that Newman house led to all sorts of other buildings, especially in steel. But as you end up more “mainstream” the commissions change. Property prices rise, budgets rise, and the clients are different. The houses are no longer modest, but “substantial”. They’re city buildings, more about what they are in the street. Those first buildings were in the bush. People would say things like: How do you make a house like a tent? You could explore what it means to be an architect in Australia. Which is, to make a building that is the minimum enclosure you need, and maximises the experience of being part of what’s beyond. Some houses I’ve done recently are on extraordinary sites, but they are not modest and not the kind of house I’d want to live in. HM: Was it easier being unconventional in those early days?

JG: With Glenn referring some clients, and with the building code not as prescriptive, you could be looser. Those early houses were like a glasshouse in the bush, very difficult to do now. I’m now towards the end of my career, but I’m also working on enormous projects, the most recent one a 70-storey residential tower in Sydney, with a team of younger architects. They’re all complaining about how we have to reduce the budget. I’m saying: Actually, the discipline of having to reduce, reduce, reduce and go to the core essence, produces a better result. You understand what is necessary and what isn’t. But if you’re doing a show-off house, it’s: Why don’t we do this in stone? In the old days you’d be doing it with plywood. Bigger houses with much bigger budgets aren’t about the essence of experience. They’re more about the client.

HM: The early houses used a lot of steel and corrugated iron, getting you noted as a pioneer of industrialised structures and materials. How did this come about?

JG: In any profession that has to do with the creation of something – words, buildings or paintings – you don’t realise until in retrospect you’ve found a pathway that gets you to a point. Once I started talking publicly about my work, I realised that growing up in Bundaberg had shown me the economy of agricultural buildings. Sheds that house tractors and farm equipment were not anything other than what they needed to be. The idea of strip-down – How wide can you space the columns? How small can the beam be? – is to make the most economic building, and then you just clad it with a piece of corrugated steel. Corrugated steel is actually a beautiful material. The corrugations compressed into the material allow you to make the material span more. This material is designed for industrial purpose, and doesn’t come laden with the sort of social status of a piece of stone. It comes with the idea of getting something to do something within itself. The essence of span is within the material itself. One project when I was studying in Sweden, was to design a stretcher that could be thrown from a helicopter in a disaster area. It had to have the minimal structure and material possible to do its maximum task, to carry a human being, on something that has to be rolled up and thrown to the ground. Those lessons were about serving function as opposed to aesthetics. When I first studied architecture in the 1970s, we didn’t use the word design. It was reduced to research, analysis and synthesis to reach a solution. And that’s the way I have operated as an architect, all the way through. To design a building for the architecture faculty at Newcastle University on an incredibly small budget, all we did was adapt the idea of a factory.

HM: You’ve said that you design a building from the inside out?

JG: A lot comes from the 1970s in Australia, a very different time from the 2020s. I was eighteen or something when Whitlam was elected. All the optimism then as a young person set you on a trajectory of exploring new things, and you were searching for what it means to be an Australian architect. Now, it’s just a blanc-mange of globalisation. Habitat was a big word in the seventies – making buildings about people’s needs, not how the buildings looked. Richard Rogers was the quintessential architect of this kind of approach. He always used to say the building is not important – it’s what happens in the building, and around or in-between the buildings. So, to design from the inside out, you ask the people what they need to do inside, whether it’s a house, a factory, or an office. So, the façade, the way the building is clad, or made, reflects what’s happening inside. It’s a continuum between the human activity determining how the building would express itself within the context of where it is. If it’s standing alone in the city it could have a whole series of carrels where people can be in a very quiet position but also able to observe the city beyond. It’s as simple as that: the activity determines the enclosure.

HM: You once said you like people to feel good inside a building, rather than remark: “Isn’t this a wonderful design.”

JG: I learnt that when I started working on bigger projects. A person very influential on my career, Rosemary Kirkby, was working for Lend Lease and they had the MLC building, a 1950s 12-storey heritage building in North Sydney. She wanted to turn this into a contemporary human workplace, as opposed to a sort of production line. I got the job in a collaboration because she recognised that a commercial building needs all the attributes of a house, that it supports human activity inside the building. And so began the next stage of my career as well, understanding that not just commercial buildings but all buildings are effectively a house. They might be a very big house but nevertheless they have the conditions of a house, which are a dialogue between intimacy and public-ness, or retreat and the outside. So, when we’re designing a research building, I always start the discussion by saying: You know this is to design a house here, so how do you design a house for cancer research? It’s trying to reduce everything to a human scale, a human tactility, as opposed to, as often the case, an economic model, an equation of operating expenses over acquisition expenses. HM: What do you make of the sprawl of suburban housing, and up and down the coast in sea-change towns?

JG: The first project I worked upon where I understood the conundrum was when a collaboration between two developers, Lend Lease and Mirvac, were bidding for the Sydney Olympic village in the mid-1990s. They approached half a dozen young architects and said: We’re going to win by doing environmental houses. So, we did courtyard houses that faced north, all solar-powered, no air-conditioning, composting toilets, made out of recycled materials or rammed earth. Lend Lease and Mirvac won the bid. The first meeting afterwards, a lot of these architects in this room, and a Mirvac executive gets up and says: “You’ve done a wonderful job, we’ve won this competition, we’re going to build a fabulous village, but of course we’ll start again, we’re not going to build anything like the ones you’ve drawn. Now my architects in Mirvac will give you the plans we use, and let’s just make some alternations to make them better.” That’s what happened. You’d have to present your designs on Friday, and he’d take them home for the weekend, and you’d get them back on Monday with big red writing all over them, what not to do and what to do. Frank Lloyd Wright had taught us you can enter a house from the side, into a courtyard, and the front of the house could then address the whole garden, and the garden could be part of the house etc. But you’d get your plan back: No way! The front door has got to be in the centre of the front wall. Why? Because people want other people to see the quality of their front door. You’d say: That’s got nothing to do with the quality of living in the house. He’d say: People have got more concern about how their building looks.

HM: And that’s the way it works generally with new suburbs?

JG: People say they want to tackle this mass housing problem, and they end up doing the same thing. The economic equation just cannot stand up at the moment. People build those terrible buildings, minimum to the boundary, 600mm, so: it’s: wall, 600mm, fence, 600mm, another wall. You can have windows in those walls. But because they’re so close to each other they block all the breezes, so they’re all air conditioned. And they’re incredibly cheap, because they just mass produce them. If you go to them and say, we’d like to do one of these but I’d like to change – I don’t want to do that, I want to do that, or put tin on the roof – they say: No, no, you can’t do anything. You’ve got to have our product because it’s a production line. The bricklayers come, then the electricians, the plumbers, and they’re doing Model X235 and everyone knows what it is. The government gives the land and doesn’t put in proper public transport. It’s a complete disaster. Whether it’s Labor or Liberal they’re focussed on all the wrong things as politicians. So, I blame the politicians. You’ve just got to look at the City of Sydney and what Clover Moore has managed to achieve – a city of densified neighbourhoods based on the notion that human communities are co-dependant, are interconnected and create a sense of belonging. The NSW government can intervene in development to provide an opportunity to make wonderful, sustainable human communities. But the vision of the government until now has not really been about creating green cities, but rather to enable developers with short term vision to propagate yet more opportunities for capitalisation with scant attention to the future.

HM: The typical family sees the $350,000 package for the kind of house you’ve described, but they don’t see any alternative. Why?

JG: Lots of architects have speculated about how to do this. Some have tried very hard to make an alternative industry of pre-fabricated houses or whatever. But the power of the developer-politician axis mitigates against this. The great cities of the world like Barcelona, even Buenos Aires, or Manhattan, are dense cities. I’m working on a building out in Sydney’s western suburbs, a 12-storeys, timber framed, Australian timber that externally will weather to grey, planting the facades to deal with sun penetration, all those sorts of things. But these are so few and far between. The Atlassian building will be a good thing, except that it’s not affordable to the ordinary developer. So, we have to find ways of making sustainability implicit in everything we do, and that’s a big challenge in itself. But that’s a much easier to overcome than suburbia. You need to change people’s fundamental views about what it is to live in their own house.

IMAGES Corrugated steel is actually a beautiful material. The corrugations compressed into the material allow you to make the material span more.

When I first studied architecture in the 1970s, we didn’t use the word design. It was reduced to research, analysis, and synthesis to reach a solution. And that’s the way I have operated as an architect, all the way through.